Oops

Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary defines garret as “a room on the highest floor of the house.”

It defines cockloft as “the room over the garret.”

| Language · Literature

“The Sweet Singer of Michigan”

Julia Moore’s poetry was so bad that it gained a national following even among her contemporaries in the 1870s. One reviewer wrote, “Shakespeare, could he read it, would be glad that he was dead”:

They once did live at Edgerton,
They once did live at Muskegon,
From there they went to Chicago,
Which proved their fatal overthrow.

It was William House’s family,
As fine a family as you see—
His family was eleven in all,
I do not think it was very small.

She stopped writing when she saw that her fans were laughing, not weeping — and, immortally, she closed her career with these lines:

And now kind friends, what I have wrote
I hope you will pass o’er,
And not criticise as some have done
Hitherto herebefore.

| Literature · Poems

Anonymous

Who wrote The Treasure of the Sierra Madre? Strangely, no one knows. The novel is credited to B. Traven, but exactly who that is has been a matter of speculation for more than 80 years.

Most of Traven’s output was published between 1926 and 1939, composed in German sprinkled with Americanisms and frequently concerning leftist politics and Mexican history.

The writer himself never came forward, and he left only intriguing clues to his identity: In the 1920s apparently he was associated with Munich anarchist Erich Mühsam, and later a Mexican journalist discovered a bank account in Traven’s name in Acapulco. When John Huston filmed The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1947, a man claiming to be Traven’s agent visited the set and appeared to take an unusual interest in the proceedings, but he disappeared afterward.

Apparently that’s how he wanted it: It now appears that the writer took on at least four distinct identities during his lifetime. One of these men wrote, “I shall always and at all times prefer to be pissed on by dogs than reveal who I am.”

| Literature

Unimpressed

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Taming_of_the_Shrew.jpg

Samuel Pepys’ opinions of Shakespeare’s plays, from his diary:

  • A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “I had never seen [it] before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.”
  • The Taming of the Shrew: “It hath some very good pieces in it, but generally is but a mean play.”
  • Romeo and Juliet: “It is a play of itself the worst that ever I heard.”
  • The Merry Wives of Windsor: “The humours of the country gentleman and the French doctor very well done, but the rest but very poorly, and Sir J. Falstaffe as bad as any.”
  • Henry IV, Part 1: “It did not please me.”
  • The Two Noble Kinsmen: “No excellent piece.”
  • Twelfth Night: “One of the weakest plays that ever I saw on the stage.”

“August 20th, 1666. To Deptford by water, reading Othello, Moor of Venice, which I ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good play; but … it seems a mean thing.”

| Literature

Duck Soup

T.S. Eliot was a fan of Groucho Marx. The two maintained a correspondence through the early 1960s, when Groucho accepted a long-offered dinner with the poet.

Eliot wrote: “The picture of you in the newspapers saying that, amongst other reasons, you have come to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit in the neighborhood, and particularly with the greengrocer across the street. Obviously I am now someone of importance.”

| Entertainment · Literature

Oh

Dylan Thomas’ 1954 play Under Milk Wood is set in the town of Llareggub.

Is that a real Welsh village? Or is it a stand-in for Laugharne, where Thomas lived in the 1930s?

Neither — read it backward.

| Literature

Strange Eyes

G.K. Chesterton used the term moor eeffocish to describe the queerness sometimes glimpsed in familiar things. He borrowed the phrase from Charles Dickens, who as an unhappy child would sometimes sit in a coffee shop in St. Martin’s Lane:

In the door there was an oval glass plate with ‘COFFEE ROOM’ painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backwards on the wrong side, MOOR EEFFOC (as I often used to do then in a dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood.

J.R.R. Tolkien later wrote: “The word Mooreeffoc may cause you to realise that England is an utterly alien land, lost either in some remote past age glimpsed by history, or in some strange dim future reached only by a time-machine; to see the amazing oddity and interest of its inhabitants and their customs and feeding-habits.”

| Literature · Society